


The Future in the Past

by Marcus_S_Lazarus



Series: The Twilight Storm [7]
Category: Doctor Who, Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: Crossover, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-02-23 14:09:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23546089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marcus_S_Lazarus/pseuds/Marcus_S_Lazarus
Summary: An encounter with one of the Cullens in their human past prompts the Doctor and Bella to investigate the origin of Bella's 'class' of vampire and their connections to the Time Lord's old enemies.
Relationships: Tenth Doctor & Bella Swan
Series: The Twilight Storm [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1694503
Kudos: 9





	1. Familiar Faces

**Author's Note:**

> Well, here you are; an original plot exploring Bella's past, as well as exploring my own theory about the origin of 'Twilight' vampires in the Whoniverse (Since the Doctor has encountered more traditional vampires in the TV storyline 'State of Decay', among other book and audio adventures)…
> 
> I'm having to improvise some of the geography here due to my lack of actual knowledge of the area I'm describing to work with my plot, but I hope nobody minds

As we walked out of the TARDIS, I couldn't help but feel slightly disappointed at the sight that greeted us; after taking the Tritovores back to their home planet, the Doctor had assured me that he had set the coordinates for a random destination on Earth in my past, but even knowing the sheer scale of human history that we could have visited, I'd still been hoping that we'd arrive somewhere interesting.

As it was, all that I could see right now was a fairly grim-looking cliff a short distance away from us as we stood on the outskirts of an equally grim-looking forest, the day reasonably overcast and a town visible a kilometre or so away, along with a small river with a relatively fast-flowing current at the bottom of the cliff.

"Where are we?" I asked, looking in confusion back at the Doctor.

"Coordinates were random, but I took a peek at the yearometer," the Doctor said, smiling casually at her. "We're just a short distance from Ashland, Wisconsin; not an area I've visited that often, but there's bound to be-"

"Hold on," I interrupted, looking sharply over at the Doctor, the name he'd just given our location swirling in my mind. "Ashland, Wisconsin?"

"Uh... yep, that's what the coordinates said," the Doctor confirmed, nodding briefly at me.

_Ashland_...

It had only been briefly mentioned to me in passing- after Edward had told me her story, I'd asked for a few additional details about where everything had happened, but I'd generally tried to avoid being too inquisitive given the emotionally sensitive nature of the whole incident-, but the tragedy of the tale I'd heard had been enough to make it stick.

"Ashland in... maybe... the early 1920s?" I asked again, looking urgently at my friend.

"Well..." the Doctor said, pausing to take a quick sniff of all things before he looked back at me, "atmospheric content _does_ suggest that we're shortly after the First World War- hints of a recent excessive use of gunpowder, the lack of iron-oxidant pollutants caused by the perfection of petrol, things like that..."

Looking urgently at the area around me as the Doctor's words faded into the background, I took in the forest behind the cliff I'd noticed earlier before my eyes fell on a figure standing on top of the cliff, my blood running cold at the sight.

The odds against it had to be impossibly long; I hadn't even told the Doctor a _thing_ about the Cullens apart from Edward's name, he couldn't even know that he wasn't the first non-human I'd met in my life or who the others were, there would be no reason for him or the TARDIS to bring me _here_...

Then the figure leapt off the cliff, and all thoughts of the unlikeliness of the possible circumstances I found myself in was forgotten; even if this wasn't who I thought it was, this wasn't the kind of situation I could ignore, even if I wasn't the Doctor's companion.

I didn't even stop to give the Doctor any kind of explanation about what had just happened; without giving any thought to the implications that this could have on my past or future, I began to run towards the cliff, the Doctor only just behind me as he anxiously followed on after me, clearly confused about what I was up to even as he continued to follow me. For a few moments, my clumsiness was forgotten as I focused on the race towards my destination, my gaze fixed on the still figure lying at the bottom of the cliff...

Finally, I reached my destination, crouching down to stare in horror at the battered and bleeding face of the young woman lying before us, my heart almost breaking at the sight of the woman who'd been virtually my second mother for a few short months lying on the ground, looking so much more broken and vulnerable than I had ever seen her look before.

"Esme..." I practically whispered, staring at the woman whose human life had just come to a particularly sudden and bloody end.


	2. Anomalous Vampires

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some references to the classic series here, but it's all relatively straightforward and it mainly comes from the Fourth Doctor episode "State of Decay"; hope you like the overall premise anyway

"Oh my God..." I said, my eyes widening even further as I took in the sheer scale of damage that Esme's body had sustained; I'd always known that she'd been through a lot, ever since Edward told me how Carlisle had turned her in the first place, but to actually see her legs and arms twisted like that, the way her back was bent, the way her chest seemed to be having to struggle just to breath...

"What?" the Doctor said, looking at me in confusion. "Bella, is something wrong?"

As soon as the Doctor had spoken, Edward's description of Esme's condition in the last moments of her human life- the thought of his voice causing far less pain than it had in the past, even if I didn't like to analyse the implications of that too closely- flashed through my memory.

" _They brought her straight to the hospital morgue, though, somehow, her heart was still beating_..."

He might not have told me precisely what drove her to that point- and it wasn't exactly something I ever felt like directly asking him anyway; who would really want to discuss a situation where they tried to kill themselves?-, but that sentence had always struck me as peculiar even if I hadn't managed to ask any of the Cullens about it; how could someone make that kind of mistake?

I knew that Esme _looked_ like she was in such a terrible condition that people could argue that she might as well be dead, but why would trained doctors assume that someone was _dead_ \- to the point of actually putting her in the morgue- when she wasn't?

Now that I was actually looking at Esme after her accident, I realised that there were far too many other anomalies about this whole situation; given how far we were from any kind of civilisation, to say nothing of any kind of hospital, making it unlikely that there were any doctors who might just 'happen' to be in the area to form a diagnosis, how could Esme have stayed alive long enough to be taken _anywhere_ when she was in this kind of shape?

Edward would have mentioned if there'd been any kind of particular mystery about how Esme got to the morgue in the first place- from what he'd told me, she'd just been found and taken to the hospital by a group of hikers who'd found her after her jump while they were coming back home for the night-, so that ruled out the possibility of the Doctor and I getting her to a hospital in time as neither of us fit the image, but there might still be _something_ that we could do...

"Can you... put her into a trance or something?" I asked, looking urgently at the Doctor; if the TARDIS could tweak my mind so that I could understand other languages, it didn't seem to be totally unreasonable to assume that the Doctor could do something like that on his own.

"What-?" the Doctor began, looking up from his examination of Esme to look at me in confusion.

"Just... do something to slow her heart down for a while so that people _think_ she's dead at a casual check-over but actually keeps her alive for a few hours," I said, looking urgently at him as I glanced around; the sun was starting to set and I could just glimpse some people walking along the side of the river some distance away, but there should be enough space between them and us for the Doctor to do what I was asking him to do and then get away before anyone saw us. "Look, I'll tell you why later, but we don't have time for me to tell you everything _right_ now; just believe me when I tell you that it won't change history, and... _do it_ , please?"

For a moment, the Doctor simply looked sceptically at me, but then he turned around and crouched down beside Esme, placing his hands on either side of her head and staring intently at her before closing his eyes and bowing his head slightly. As I watched, Esme's faint but painful breaths- somehow, the fact that Esme was breathing was almost more strange than seeing her injured in the first place- slowed even further, until her chest had ceased to rise and fall altogether, her body so still that only my faith in the Doctor and my knowledge of the future allowed me to be sure that she wasn't dead.

"It's done," he said, looking up at me. "Now-"

"This... really isn't the time," I said, looking anxiously down the river at the group of walkers I'd seen earlier, still approaching our current location. "Just... get back to the TARDIS and I'll explain everything, OK?"

After staring at me in silence for a moment, the Doctor nodded in resignation and turned around to head back towards the ship, leaving me to follow him into the police box, sparing a last moment to glance behind me as the walkers began to approach Esme's body.

"Be safe..." I whispered, half to myself and half to the woman who could have been my second mother if things hadn't fallen apart at my birthday party.

It might not be quite the life she would have wanted, but Esme deserved to have her children...

Finally, after a run that felt like it had taken far longer than it should, we were inside the TARDIS once more, the Doctor setting the controls before he turned around to look at me, the glass thing in the central column- I thought that the Doctor had called the 'time rotor' at one point, but I wouldn't like to swear to it- moving up and down in the manner that indicated that we were in flight once more.

"So," the Doctor said, his arms folded as he looked at me, "would you care to explain why I did that?"

"That's... a bit complicated," I said, taking a deep breath to prepare myself for what I was about to do before I continued speaking. "That woman we just found... her name's Esme, and I knew her before I met you."

"Go on," the Doctor said, his tone a serious, grim one that I had only heard from him when discussing the Time War that had destroyed the other Time Lords; at least it looked like he was going to let me say whatever I had to say, regardless of his scepticism about my story so far.

"Well... she's a vampire-" I began, only for the Doctor's eyes to widen in what I could only describe as horror as he looked at me.

"A _vampire_?" the Doctor said, a cold hatred suddenly dominating his expression in a manner that I would have never expected to see in my friend's face.

"Uh... yeah?" I said, looking uncertainly back at him. "Look, I know that they've got a bad reputation-"

"The first major war my people _ever_ fought was against vampires, Bella Swan!" the Doctor practically spat at me, walking over from the console to stand over me with a cold stare that caused me to momentarily flash back to that tortured Dalek we'd spoken with during that whole mess with the Arkheon threshold. "We drove them to extinction-!"

"You _what_?" I repeated, my shock at this turn of events replaced by indignation; James and Victoria had definitely been scary, but the Cullens alone proved that not all vampires were like that. "What about the ones who didn't _want_ to be-?"

"They were a manifestation of pure _evil_ , Bella!" the Doctor yelled, glaring indignantly at me. "Oh, maybe a few later ones didn't like what they were because it wasn't 'convenient' to be a blood-sucking fiend, but Rassilon wiped out the only vampires that might have chosen otherwise at the dawn of civilisation on my planet; even if I don't approve of what he did, that doesn't change the fact that every time I fought vampires myself, I ended up staking them, and now I've just-!"

"Hold on; _staked_?" I interrupted, holding up both hands to halt the Doctor's speech as my mind latched on to the anomaly of what he'd just told me. "You _staked_ them?"

"Well... I varied it a bit- exposed some of them to sunlight after tricking them into travelling to a planet in a binary star system, that kind of thing-" the Doctor began, his anger suddenly replaced by confusion as he took in my reaction.

"But... stakes don't _work_ on vampires," I said, looking uncertainly at him. "And sunlight doesn't either; their skin's some kind of... glowing rock..."

"They're silicon-based?" the Doctor said, looking at me in surprise, his anger forgotten in the face of this new information, a contemplative expression on his face.

"I... uh, I take it... the vampires _you_ know... weren't?" I asked, looking uncertainly at the Doctor; after so long dealing with Jake's automatic anti-vampire attitude, I was already setting myself up for the possibility that I would face some kind of argument with the Doctor about what he believed vampires to be like versus my own perceptions of them, but so far he actually seemed to be listening to what I had to say...

"No, they weren't; completely flesh and blood creatures with an increased sensitivity to ultraviolet radiation, a certain sensitivity to garlic, and some even have issues with faith; crucifixes are convenient focuses, but really you could hold them back with anything so long as you believe in it enough..." the Doctor said, tapping his chin thoughtfully before he looked over at me as he finally came to a decision. "I think we need to take a closer look at this."

"'This'?" I repeated in confusion.

"These vampires you told me about, of course," the Doctor said, looking at me with a slight smile. "As I said, they don't fit any category of vampire that I know about; the vampires I knew were always flesh-based, and judging by your obvious concern for Esme out there, I feel safe assuming that she was a friend to you in the future?"

"She was... well, she was like my second mother," I said, smiling slightly uncertainly at my friend, the usual pain at the memory of the Cullens' departure lessened in the face of this sudden apparent mystery of their origins; I might only have the Doctor's word that they were different from other vampires, but I also knew that he had no reason to lie about something like that, and when I thought about it, it _did_ make sense that there were vampires out there who _did_ match the old stories more than the Cullens did. "She was the mother in a family of seven vampires, and they all drank animal blood; from what they told me, it didn't taste as satisfying as human blood would, but it did the job..."

"OK," the Doctor said, nodding gratefully at me as he contemplatively sat down on the chair beside the TARDIS console, swinging his legs up to rest on the console as he clasped his hands and tapped his fingers together as he stared up at the ceiling. "So, we know that these vampires can choose to feed on something other than humans even if they're naturally inclined to do so, we know that sunlight, faith and garlic apparently have no effect on them, we know that they're silicone-based rather than carbon-based... where to next?"

"Uh..." I began, rolling up my sleeve and indicating the scar where James had bitten me so many months before- it wasn't prominent enough to be obvious unless you were looking for it, and I'd been mostly wearing long-sleeved tops since I started travelling with the Doctor anyway-, "would this help?"

"This?" the Doctor repeated, putting on his glasses and walking over to examine the scar more closely, looking up at me inquiringly as he finished his analysis. "What is it?"

"I was bitten by one of those vampires- not Esme's family; a wandering vampire who just happened to be in the area at the same time as me- a few months back," I explained, indicating the wound in my arm. "The Cullens were able to prevent me from actually becoming a vampire by sucking the venom out, but maybe... I don't know..."

"There's some residue in the wound that we could use?" the Doctor finished for me, smiling as he took my hand and held my wrist up to his face, studying it contemplatively for a few moments before he smiled and looked back at me with a confirming nod. "It's as good a shot as any; to the laboratory!"


	3. Tracking the Venom

Less than an hour later, the Doctor and I were standing in the console room once again, staring at the screen on the TARDIS console as an image of Earth rapidly revolved in front of us; according to the Doctor, the image was going backwards, but it was hard to make out as the speed that the globe was turning at made it difficult at best to recognise individual continents.

"Right then," the Doctor said, looking firmly over at me as he tapped a few controls on the console around the screen, "based on the DNA samples I acquired from that wound of yours, I'm pretty sure that I've identified the unique bio-vibrations of the particular breed of vampires we're dealing with here; all we need to do now is let the TARDIS run its search, and we can take it from there."

"It's that... simple?" I asked, looking between my currently-exposed wrist and the screen displaying the world that I had lived on until the Doctor showed me others; even after everything I'd seen the TARDIS accomplish, the idea that we were now essentially searching Earth's entire _history_ was truly incredible...

"Actually, my peoples' old war is the only reason we can do this; TARDISes were programmed with the ability to track vampire DNA backwards through time in order to determine when they first appeared on particular planets," the Doctor explained, shrugging almost apologetically at me. "It's not much good at tracking individual vampires- even with a race as unique as this one apparently is, the adaptable nature of the virus means that they can blend in virtually everywhere without giving away just how different they are at long-range-, but at the same time, that venom's so distinctive that we should be able to... ah _hah_!"

"What?" I asked, looking at him curiously. "You've found something?"

"Naturally," the Doctor said, grinning over at me. "This particular sample of vampire venom can be first found on Earth in the area that would become Romania in your time, approximately the year you'd consider 2000 B.C.; just let me pinpoint the coordinates and we can get there a _little_ bit in advance... how long does the turning process take?"

"Everything I heard suggested that it would take three days," I replied.

"Right now; make it four days before the first occurrence, and we should have enough time to find what we're looking for if we land in the general area," the Doctor said, smiling at me as he set the coordinates.

"Uh..." I said, looking uncertainly at him as I indicated my clothes. "If we're going to this kind of time... should I... well... change?"

"Oh, no need; given the circumstances of our arrival and what we're looking for, any natives we run into will probably just assume we're gods," the Doctor said with a shrug. "Easiest way to tackle the problem, really; show up, find what we're after, and-"

"Actually, could we just... keep it low-key?" I said, as another thought occurred to me. "You know... not make contact with anyone else here unless we have to?"

"What?" the Doctor asked, looking curiously at me. "Why not?"

"It's just that..." I began, thinking briefly about what had just occurred to me to be sure that I was phrasing it the right way, "well, the vampires I've met always said that they had a perfect memory once turned- anything they experienced would always be remembered-, but some of them can remember what happened to them while they were human under the right circumstances, so... well..."

"You'd prefer that we fly under the radar so that we can be reasonably sure nobody's going to remember you when we get back," the Doctor finished for me nodding in understanding before he looked more curiously at me. "Could these vampires live that long?"

"Uh... I don't know," I said, shrugging apologetically. "I known that Carlisle- he was like the 'father' of Edward's family- was around three and a half centuries old and he still looked the same way as he does now a couple of centuries ago, but apart from that..."

"Only three and a half?" the Doctor said, smiling slightly at the thought. "Good age for most, but that's still younger than me."

"Really?" I said, looking curiously at him. "Uh... how old _are_ you?"

"Around thirteen hundred, give or take a few decades," the Doctor said with a casual shrug.

I had to hold on to the pillar nearest my current location to stop myself from falling over at that news.

I'd known that the Doctor old ever since he mentioned that the TARDIS had been stuck as a police box for centuries, but to know that he was _that_ old...

H was probably older than the entire Cullen family combined- I didn't exactly know the specific dates that most of them had been turned, but I'd heard enough to make a few guesses-, and he still looked like _that_?

"You... uh... you aged well?" I said at last, smiling awkwardly at him; it wasn't entirely appropriate, but it was all that I could think of to say.

"Actually, it's not as straightforward as you think; I've actually sustained death-inducing injuries on at least nine occasions before now," the Doctor said, smiling casually at me even as a slight edge appeared in his eyes as he spoke.

"Pardon?" I said, looking at him in confusion.

"It's a... thing that my people can do when we're facing death," the Doctor explained as he looked at me; judging by the awkward expression on his face, he wasn't entirely comfortable about revealing this to me, but, just like when I had learned what Edward was, he was resolved to answer my questions. "If we're fatally injured, our bodies can completely regenerate; we literally become new people to recover from the damage. I actually died of old age in my first body after around four and a half centuries of age, but since then I've made it this far with only outside circumstances being responsible for my deaths; some nasty accidents, a few instances where I've received lethal doses of various types of radiation, that kind of thing..."

He shrugged slightly s he looked back at me. "It's not the most conventional kind of immortality, of course- it still feels a bit weird knowing that who and what I _was_ isn't what I _am_ -, but I like to think I cope well."

"Oh," was all that I could say to that new revelation about my friend.  
  
The idea that the Doctor was an alien had been something I'd been able to accept relatively easily, but the idea that he had actually _died_...  
  
I wasn't sure if I should consider it 'cool'- as much as I hated to use that word- or disturbing; it sounded like either could apply.  
  
"Anyway," I said, shaking my head to force those thoughts aside as I looked back at the Doctor- as interesting as regeneration sounded, we had more immediate issues right now-, "the point of what I was saying is that, if we can avoid being seen by anyone, that might make it simpler later; there may be several centuries between my time and here, but I'd rather not run the risk of doing anything to create a millennia-old grudge."  
  
"Always a wise precaution, really; I've known people dedicate their lives to revenge, and it never got them anywhere, but it was always inconvenient stopping them," the Doctor said, smiling briefly at me before he turned his attention back to the console as the central column stopped moving, our previous discussion apparently forgotten in the face of the new challenge that we were about to face. "Anyway, we're here now; just give me an hour or so to whip up a portable venom detector, and we're sorted."  
  
With that, he turned around and headed towards the TARDIS's inner door, pausing only briefly as he turned to look back at me. "Just to check, what weaknesses _do_ these vampires have?"  
  
"Uh... their venom's very flammable," I said, looking at him with a sudden sense of uncertainty; as much as I trusted the Doctor, the thought of us having to kill a vampire like the Cullens without the Cullens there to help wasn't exactly comforting. "If we can crack their skin somehow and start a big enough fire by igniting their venom in some way, that _should_ be enough to stop them..."  
  
"It's something to go on, anyway," the Doctor said, nodding grimly at me. "I've got some everlasting matches somewhere in the wardrobe that might do the job; check the pockets of the dark coats in the Victorian section- that's what I wore when I used those things regularly-, and meet me back here in an hour."  
  
As the Doctor hurried off deeper into the vast network of corridors that filled the interior of the TARDIS- I still found it hard to even find my way to the room that the TARDIS had set aside for me after I started looking for somewhere to sleep; sometimes it seemed like the TARDIS just put it behind the nearest door when I became tired of trying to find it-, I was left to make my way to the wardrobe room- fortunately one of the rooms that was always consistently near the door-, trying not to think too much about the implications of what we were about to do.  
  
We were about to try and find out the origin of the vampires that had been my introduction to the idea that there was more to the world than what everyone else saw and believed was there, and the only thing the Doctor was apparently willing to bring in the way of weapons were these 'everlasting matches' that I might not even be able to find...  
  
Even if I knew that the Doctor's plans hadn't let us down so far, given that we were going into this situation with only my knowledge to rely on regarding the capabilities of these vampires, I _really_ had to wonder if he knew what he was doing...


	4. Climbing into History

A couple of hours later, as we lay on the ground a short distance away from the first village we'd found, with the TARDIS safely parked in a cliff that was in a good position to face the rising sunlight- on the grounds that the Doctor reasoned that no traditional vampire would even think of hiding there-, I wondered what we were actually doing here.

In some ways, the opportunity to watch what were probably some of the first human beings to form any kind of society was kind of interesting, even if the village was pitifully basic and only consisted of a few small huts; if I'd been able to use this kind of information as credit for history class, I could have made a brilliant report on it.

I knew that I couldn't do it, of course- if nothing else, I couldn't exactly cite the Doctor and the TARDIS as my sources-, but it was still interesting to look at the people who were the most distant ancestors of all modern humans preparing for the day's events, working on everything from making clothes to setting up houses and hunting for food in one small area, each of them responsible for a specific task required to cope in daily life rather than the complexity of the world where I came from...

Right now, however, points of historical interest aside, our priority was the vampires in the area rather than the humans. The Doctor had assembled an object that reminded me a bit of the thing he'd used when we were tracking that wormhole during our brief trip to London, except that this version had what looked like a bar-code reader with an elongated scanner in the place of the small dish that the original device had possessed, along with a small screen at the back that would, according to the Doctor, allow it to display the distance between our current location and wherever the vampires were.

"Any luck finding them?" I asked, looking curiously at the Doctor after we'd been lying there for a few moments; as fascinating as this was, we couldn't exactly wait here forever, particularly if the Doctor's projected timeline about when vampires were going to manifest on Earth was accurate.

"Just a moment..." the Doctor, adjusting a dial on the scanner, aiming his sonic screwdriver at the device to adjust something, before the screen suddenly lit up with a brilliant green light, quickly fading to a lower light as the Doctor adjusted the dial again.

"There it is," he said, smiling grimly as he indicated the direction that the scanner had illuminated earlier. "Just head that way for about... an hour or so of brisk walking, and we should be there."

"Right," I said, glancing in the direction that the Doctor had indicated; there was a mountain a short distance away, but the landscape, while not exactly smooth, also wasn't unsteady enough for me to worry about tripping. "Uh... lead on, MacDuff?"

"Always glad to see someone who knows literature," the Doctor said, smiling at me before he began to walk towards the direction indicated by the scanner.

As I followed him, I wasn't sure if I should feel like I was intruding on the creation of Frankenstein's monster or the creation of Adam and Eve; on the one hand, vampires were a sentient race with just as much right to exist as anything else, but on the other hand the Doctor himself had stated that he was certain that these vampires were somehow connected to the vampires he'd fought in the past, which really made them more of an experiment...

Still, as we approached the mountains, it quickly became obvious that whatever we were looking for was located in a cave hidden some way up the mountain, only visible to us because the Doctor and I were looking for something like that; far enough away from the village to avoid attracting attention without being so far away that whatever early vampires lived there would have had trouble finding 'food', particularly if they possessed anything like the strength of their 'descendants'.

As we began to climb the mountain I was initially worried about the possibility of tripping, but the Doctor seemed to have a natural knack for knowing where to step to avoid trouble, our subsequent ascent up the mountain being relatively straightforward so long as I focused on stepping only where the Doctor stepped.

"You... do this... a lot?" I asked after we'd been walking for almost an hour, looking uncertainly at the Doctor as we continued to climb.

"The mountain-climbing?" the Doctor said, shrugging slightly as he glanced back at me. "Just bits and pieces, really; most times when I've done this sort of thing the mountain's already had a path put together by something, and the last time I was in Vesuvius I was walking through the underground tunnels-"

" _Vesuvius_?" I said, halting in my tracks as I stared incredulously at the Doctor. "You were in _Pompeii_?"

"Twice, actually," the Doctor said, a suddenly pained expression on his face as he spoke. "First time I just nearly got trapped in the city- found the TARDIS in an archaeological dig in the 1970s and thought it meant that I'd lose the old girl there, but I got around it by staying in her while the lava hardened around her and then taking a quick hop forward nineteen hundred years without moving an inch in space-, but the second time..."

He paused, leaning against the cliff alongside the path with a frustrated sigh. "The second time I went there, I had to set off the eruption to stop a bunch of fire-based aliens taking over Earth with Pompeii as the centre of their planned empire."

"Oh," I said, once again feeling uncomfortable at the news that I had just- even if unintentionally- forced the Doctor to share.

I knew even without hearing the full story that the Doctor hadn't had a choice- what he'd told me during that mess with the Daleks had been enough; if he couldn't change history to save his entire race, he definitely couldn't do it to stop anything that I knew about Earth's history-, but that wouldn't exactly make it any easier to cope with the knowledge that he'd caused something like that...

"We're here," the Doctor said after a period of walking that I'd stopped consciously thinking about after what he'd told me- a part of me wondered if he'd done that deliberately, but it didn't matter-, looking solemnly at the cave that was the apparent source of the readings he'd detected earlier, before he turned to face me. "Now then, if these are the vampires I'm used to dealing with- and I have no reason to believe they're not- the crucial thing to focus on right now is faith."

"Faith?" I repeated in confusion.

"You know the old story about vampires being kept back by crucifixes?" the Doctor said, smiling briefly at me until I nodded in confirmation and his expression became more serious. "Similar idea, but they got the reason wrong; it's not the crucifix itself that keeps it back, but the faith of the person wielding it, since faith affects the transition between the quantum and classical states of physics in the humanoid mind, so if you focus on something you _really_ believe in, you generate a barrier of faith that can keep them back."

"Like... what?" I asked uncertainly, trying desperately to consider what I had enough faith in to keep a vampire away from me.

"I knew a Russian soldier in 1942 who walked through an entire graveyard full of vampires because of his faith in the Russian Revolution; just focus on something you _really_ believe in, and you'll be fine," he said, smiling at me in a manner that I knew was intended to give me more confidence than I should feel at that announcement.

Believing in something might not sound difficult, but believing in something to _that_ extent...

As I looked at the cave in front of me, I knew that I'd never been one for faith; everything I'd ever tried to believe in had let me down in some way or another over the course of my life. My parents couldn't be fully counted on for anything no matter how much I loved them, Jacob had kept secrets from me, Edward had left me...

_But the Doctor hadn't_.

It was a strange and sudden thought to have, but as I looked at my friend, I realised that it was true; regardless of the fact that we'd only really met a relatively short while ago, even in the moments where the Doctor seemed lost, I never had anything less than total faith that he would get us both through our latest threat.

It might be strange to have faith in someone I'd only known for a matter of weeks over my parents and boyfriend, but I couldn't chance how I felt; I believed in the Doctor, and that was that.

Taking a deep breath, I focused on my faith in the Doctor and began to walk into the cave after him, my eyes straining to focus on his rapidly-retreating coat as we ventured further into the dark cave.

In a life of strange and dangerous things, this was definitely the strangest- even if I had some doubts about it being the most dangerous-; I was actually deliberately _looking_ for a vampire...


	5. Forging the Hybrid

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The classic series monsters here appeared in the Fourth Doctor story "The Stones of Blood", if anyone wants to know more about them

After walking through the dark cave for so long I was starting to wonder if the cave was like the TARDIS- surely this mountain couldn't be _that_ thick, although I admitted that we might have been walking downwards at a couple of points in our walk and I just hadn't noticed-, we came to a dimly-illuminated cavern, containing what looked like computers and other electronic equipment.

The design of the technology would have seemed rather basic by the standards of technology that I was familiar with in the future- the computers alone seemed to be ridiculously large to me-, but when I took the current time period into account, I had a feeling that the large screens and control panels around us were probably capable of more than the obvious functions. The sight of a large table in the centre of the room invoked unpleasant images of the creation of Frankenstein's monster in my mind, but I pushed those thoughts aside; it might potentially fit with what we were here to investigate- even if I still couldn't quite imagine 'my' vampires as twisted experiments-, but I had to focus on whatever the Doctor was looking for if we were going to find the answers to the questions I'd unintentionally raised.

"The vampire must be through there," the Doctor said, indicating the opening at the back of the cave before he looked firmly at me. "Just stay quiet, and we should be able to get through this; give me a moment..."

As I watched, he tapped a few controls on the nearest console, and the lights raised in the lab while a door slid shut over the open chamber at the back, moving with a surprising silence despite the somewhat clunky-looking nature of everything else here. As the lights rose, the Doctor's eyes turned away from the console to focus on what looked like a somewhat misshapen pillar in the middle of the room, about a couple of heads taller than the Doctor and slightly wider, positioned close to the table that I'd noticed earlier.

"An _Ogri_?" the Doctor said, his eyes widening in shock as he looked at the rock.

"Where?" I asked, looking around in confusion before I turned my attention back to him, unable to see the alien that the Doctor had noticed. "Is it behind the rock?"

"It _is_ the rock," the Doctor clarified, looking at the large thing before us with a grim stare.

"Wh- the _rock_?" I repeated, looking incredulously at the large stone shape in front of us. "The _rock_ is an _alien_?"

I'd known that the Cullens were technically rock, of course- the sounds James had made when he'd been torn apart wasn't something I'd forget; a twisted combination of tearing flesh and stone being broken, accompanied by the screams-, but I'd somehow assumed that most life-forms would naturally conform to the 'two arms, two legs' image I'd formed of the sentient aliens we'd encountered so far (The Daleks were an obvious exception to the rule, but given that they were the end result of mutations caused by centuries of war I didn't count them as a result of natural evolution); the idea that evolution could produce something shaped so randomly was...

Maybe I was just prejudiced because it didn't _look_ human, but that didn't mean that it wasn't strange.

"Is there something... significant about it?" I asked, looking uncertainly at the Doctor. "I mean, is there a reason why a vampire might want an Ogri?"

"The most obvious thing is the fact that the Ogri rely on various types of proteins to exist," the Doctor explained as he looked back at me, reverting back to his 'lecture mode' even while I noticed that a part of him was focusing on the door and the Ogri as he spoke; evidently he wanted to make sure that nothing discovered us even if he clearly considered this important for me to know. "These proteins were fairly common on Ogros, their home planet, but on Earth the only source of most of them is human blood, with the result that they drain the blood from humans to survive."

"Ah," I said, nodding in understanding; I suppose that a creature like that _would_ be interesting to any vampire. "So... how did they get here?"

"They were brought to Earth by an alien criminal called Cessair of Diplos several centuries ago, where they became part of a stone circle in England that was naturally a popular location for human sacrifice due to the Ogri absorbing the blood that was spilled on them," the Doctor explained. "They generally remained dormant for several centuries until Cessair had reason to wake them up again, with Cessair assuming various aliases to control the land where they existed- she had stolen an artefact that allowed her to sustain her life for centuries-, until... my current companion and I were able to destroy two of the Ogri and helped Cessair's jailers recapture the third in the 1970s."

"So... is this a new one?" I asked, looking curiously at the rock, trying to focus on something in the here and now rather than the dizzying length of time that the Doctor had just nonchalantly mentioned to me. "I mean, could it have come here because of something the vampire did on its own?"

"Actually, judging by the timing- Cessair arrived five thousand years before your time, and we're pretty much that far back anyway-, I wouldn't be surprised if it's another of the Ogri that she brought here," the Doctor said, shrugging slightly as he looked at me. "I mean, you can't exactly make an intimidating impression with just three rocks, but even someone like Cessair wouldn't want to attract too much trouble from the vampire lords by complaining about them taking her pet rock; it's possible that she came here with more and the three I encountered... when I dealt with her... were just the only survivors."

"Ah," I said, looking uncertainly at the technology around us before I looked back at the Doctor. "So... why would a vampire want an Ogri?"

"I have an idea or two, but that-" the Doctor began, before he looked up sharply, his eyes widening in horrified realisation. "Something's coming."

"What?" I said, looking in confusion at the Doctor even as he pulled out the sonic screwdriver and aimed it at the nearest console, the lights around us dimming rapidly before he pulled something out of his pocket and tossed it over to me.

"A key on a string?" I said, looking at him in confusion even as I took the hint and hung the object around my neck.

"Little something I made up after a crisis I experienced a few years back; in an emergency, these TARDIS keys can link up to the ship and function as perception filters that deflect any attempt to pay attention to us, so long as we're not dealing with full-blown telepaths or near-insane people," the Doctor explained, smiling briefly at me before he grabbed my arm and held me up against the wall, just as the door opened and a man who could only be a vampire walked into the room- the smart jumpsuit-like attire he was wearing clearly marked him out as not being a native of this time, even if he didn't have abnormally sharp teeth-, dragging a man dressed in tattered animal skins who was almost certainly a native of this era. As we watched, the vampire strapped the human to the table, the victim squirming and yelling untranslatable words and phrases that left me wondering if language had even _developed_ by this point...

Only the obvious tension in the Doctor's stance made it clear that he hated this as much as I did; the only difference was that he was remembering the real reason we were here.

Even if I didn't remember the Doctor's warning about the unpredictability of what might happen if we changed history- who was to say that some of the people that the vampire breed I knew had killed in the past (Or would kill in the future) wouldn't have gone on to do something terrible if they hadn't died when they did?-, a small, selfish part of me didn't want to deprive the Cullens of the chance to get to know each other.

I didn't know what was going to happen here, but I did know that, if the Doctor wasn't going to do anything, I wasn't going to take any action either...

Stepping back with a smile as he finished strapping the victim to the table, the vampire bared his teeth- as much as I'd grown used to the Cullens' type of vampire as being 'normal', it was almost unnerving how easy it was to think of this thing as a vampire- and lunged towards the victim on the table, digging his teeth into the man's wrist as he placed his free hand on the Ogri. For a moment, the vampire's form seemed to be becoming dehydrated and rehydrated as we watched- my best guess was that, based on what the Doctor told me about the Ogri, the Ogri was taking blood from the vampire as fast as the vampire was drinking it from his victim- until he suddenly released his grip on Ogri and victim, stepping back with a satisfied gasp and a broad grin on his face as he licked his bloody lips.

As the Doctor and I watched, he turned to face the stone-like alien and broke off a piece of it, creating a brief pressure in the air that I assumed was the Ogri equivalent of a scream- even if it was just an animal, it had to have _some_ way to communicate, after all-, followed by it

raised one arm and ran a sharp fingernail from the other hand over his wrist, leaving a trace of blood- blacker than any blood I had ever seen- before he placed the cut wrist over the human's lips. For a few moments, the human simply sucked at the wound, apparently unable to do anything else in his current position, before he reeled back with an agonised scream of agony, prompting the vampire to step back and snap some kind of helmet-like device attached to the table on top of the human's head.

"Perfect," the vampire said, grinning as he studied the figure before him, before walking over to study another console, muttering thoughtfully to himself as he worked. "Just a few more days to let the transformation run its course, and then the programming should take effect..."

I'd barely had time to think about what we'd just heard before the Doctor walked up behind the vampire, looked back at me for a moment, and then turned back to place his hand on the vampire's shoulder. The vampire suddenly screamed in pain as it clutched at the Doctor's arm as though trying to tear it away, only for the Doctor to pull a wooden stake out of his coat and ram it into the vampire's chest, leaving it to collapse into dust before it could do anything.

"Focused faith while in direct contact with the vampire; doesn't work if it knows you're there and doesn't give you time to concentrate, but _very_ effective if you have the time to focus," the Doctor explained, smiling briefly at me before he turned his attention back to the man on the table, now writhing and straining against his straps as he experienced a pain I could only barely remember myself, from those brief moments when I had struggled against James's venom before it had been taken out of me by Edward and the others...

"That's normal," I said at last, swallowing as I looked at the body.

"Pardon?" the Doctor asked, looking back at me.

"The pain he's in," I said, looking apologetically at the Doctor; my friend wouldn't like hearing that the pain someone was experiencing had to happen, but it wasn't like there was anything else we could do right now. "Vampire venom- the venom that the Cullens use- is... well, it's painful; the transformation takes three days, but once it's over, the vampire's apparently fully mutated."

"No way to stop it?" the Doctor asked.

"Edward managed to suck the venom out of me when I was bitten once, but... well, there's no way to stop the pain if that's what you mean..." I said, looking awkwardly at the Time Lord. "I'm... I'm sorry..."

"Nothing we could do about that," the Doctor said, sighing as he walked over to examine the helmet attached to the man on the table, following the connecting cables to the nearest console before looking over at me with a smile. "Well, on the bright side, we don't have to worry about the essential details of this situation; this helmet appears to be connected to a psychological reprogramming device."

"A what?" I asked.

"Essentially, a brainwashing machine," the Doctor explained, hurrying over to examine another console (I wasn't sure if I should be impressed or uncomfortable at the ease with which the Doctor was able to ignore the man screaming in pain behind us, but I knew the Doctor well enough by now to know that he would have a reason for doing so), pulling up various bits of text on the screen. "From what I can tell, the vampire we stopped earlier was trying to combine the vampire virus- not that he'd call it that, of course- with Ogri DNA in the hope of triggering a mutation in the virus; by letting the Ogri drain blood from him while he fed, he apparently hoped that he would trigger a mutation in the blood the Ogri absorbed..."

"That's why he... broke it?" I asked, indicating where the vampire had broken a chunk of rock off the Ogri earlier.

"Exactly; get to the blood before the Ogri was able to fully absorb it, and he hoped that the result would trigger a mutation that he could use for himself," the Doctor explained, nodding grimly at me before he walked over to the console connected to the helmet. "Of course, that's where this comes in; from what you've told me of your vampires, there's no reason for the conventional vampires to realistically expect them to take orders from the 'original' vampires, given their sheer power level, so this thing must be designed to help them 'program' the vampires to take their orders."

"Really?" I said, looking at the machine with a renewed sense of unease. The thought of Edward being able to access my mind before he'd told me that he couldn't had been uncomfortable enough, and I'd only just come to accept the TARDIS's ability to affect my mind just enough for me to understand foreign languages; if that thing could actually _make_ vampires do something...

"Hold on; they're going to put every vampire that's turned in something like this?" I asked looking in confusion at the Doctor as another thought occurred to me. "I mean, maybe they can do that at first-"

"They only need to do it once; from what I can tell, this device is so thorough that it would actually encode the instructions given directly into the vampires' genetic memory," the Doctor explained, shaking his head as he grimly studied the machinery for a moment before he looked over at me. "Now then, what were the 'rules' of the vampire society the Cullens belonged to?"

"Uh... keep the secret, mainly," I replied after a moment's thought to ensure that I was remembering the tale correctly. "Vampires aren't to attract attention by killing in large numbers in specific areas, vampires don't tell humans what they are if the humans are going to be left human- the Cullens had a few debates about whether they were going to turn me or not because of that-, things like that..."

"In other words, they're to stay underground and not attract attention to themselves or exert authority over the general human population; understood," the Doctor said, rapidly tapping away at the controls in front of him for a few more minutes, the helmet around the head of the still-turning vampire glowing in response to its actions, until he stepped back and nodded. "All right then; that should do it."

"You've programmed it?" I said, looking at the still-thrashing form on the table in surprise. "Already?"

"They wanted to be able to instruct the new vampires as quickly as possible; they didn't have your foreknowledge of how long the transformation would take and didn't want to waste time finding out about that the hard way," the Doctor explained, before he pulled out the sonic screwdriver, tweaked the setting, and aimed it at the various computers around us. "Just let me attend to this, and we can be on our way..."

As we turned and hurried out of the room, the computers behind us began to spark, small explosions erupting from the consoles as the screens cracked and the images displayed on them disappeared, and I could only hope that whatever dark experiments had taken place here would never go further than what they'd done already.

As I heard the screams starting again behind us as the first of the Cullen's breed of vampires progressed through the transformation with ever-increasing agony, I could only hope that he wouldn't kill _too_ many people before he started creating the vampire society that I knew had to exist.

We'd preserved the future, and all we'd had to do was create a race of vampires who would kill so many people between now and my now...

_God_ , time travel could put you in morally complicated situations.


	6. Reflections of a Vamp-Related Nature

A few hours after leaving Earth's past, I found myself sitting in the TARDIS's kitchen, preparing a basic snack for myself out of a lack of anything else to do. The Doctor and I might both recognise that he'd only done what he had to do in order to preserve history- from past examples it seemed fairly obvious that trying to change history wouldn't be a smart move-, but that didn't mean that I didn't feel at least slightly guilty about the fact that he was essentially forced to create a new breed of his race's oldest enemies because I'd inspired his own curiosity.

I wasn't sure if I'd have ever told him about what the vampires I'd encountered if we hadn't encountered Esme before her human death- the odds against such an encounter had to be incredible-, but there was no point in worrying about how I might have brought that topic up when it had already been exposed. I could make all kinds of mental arguments about how the Doctor would have had to do what he'd done at some point in his life- I didn't know much about time travel, but if the Doctor hadn't been there I had no doubt that the vampire who'd created 'my' vampires wouldn't have instilled the Doctor's programmed commands to not try and take control of the human race-, but the fact remained that he'd only had to do it _now_ because of me...

"Are you all right?" the Doctor's voice asked, breaking into my melancholy train of thought. Looking up, I smiled slightly at the sight of my friend, looking at me with nothing but the same casual concern and curiosity that he'd always shown in me, with no sign that he resented what I'd revealed to him or what he'd had to do to preserve history.

"I'm fine," I said, shrugging out of a lack of anything else to do; admitting that I felt guilty wouldn't do any good, but maybe if I understood how the Doctor was dealing with this situation I could help _him_ get over whatever he might be feeling about this mess. "But... how about you? I mean, we couldn't save _anyone_ there..."

"The Ogri was pretty much already dead and it was nothing but an animal; saving it would have been pointless," the Doctor said briefly, shrugging slightly dismissively; there was a slight tension about his stance as he spoke, but otherwise he seemed to be telling the truth that the death of the Ogri wasn't that much of a concern for him.

"And... what about other humans the vampire might have been studying?" I asked, looking uncertainly at my friend.

It was almost disturbing to think about how in the past I wouldn't have cared much about 'collateral damage' so long as the people _I_ knew were safe- admittedly, I would have just not cared about it by not thinking about it unless someone brought it up-, but something about working with the Doctor encouraged you to think beyond yourself...

Besides, no matter how much of a mystery he might still be to me, I liked to think that I knew the Doctor well enough to see that what he had just been forced to do had really hurt him.

"He wouldn't have bothered taking more than one hostage at a time; keeping them alive would be too much of a hassle, and too many disappearances would draw too much attention to what he was doing," the Doctor explained. "He might have been trying to create a race of super-vampires, but until he'd achieved his goal he wouldn't want to let anyone else know that he was there by taking too many people captive at once, given that even a primitive culture like this could overwhelm him if they found him during daylight; trust me, there was nobody else in that base when we left."

"Good," I said, smiling at the Time Lord before another thought occurred to me about a potentially less awkward topic that I hadn't had the chance to ask about earlier. "When you... sensed... the vampire earlier... how did you do that? Know where he was, I mean?"

"I've encountered enough vampires over the years- plus, there was this whole thing that happened to me the last time I met one- to have a bit of a sensitivity for what they're doing when I'm looking for them," the Doctor explained, looking at me with a slight shrug. "With that in mind, it's relatively easy for me to cast a basic 'psychic net' to know when one's in the area; it's essentially similar to this old sense I used to get when I was in the vicinity of another Time Lord... like the 'shadow' version of that feeling, if you will."

"Ah," I said, nodding in simple understanding.

When the Doctor started to say anything that would refer to the other Time Lords, there was no sense in continuing that discussion any further; there was no reason for me to know more, so he wasn't going to talk about it.

"So," the Doctor said, looking at me with a somewhat pointed stare, clearly having come to the same conclusion as me that our original conversation was over, "you dated a vampire?"

"Well... for a few months, yeah," I said, nodding at him, now increasingly aware of what I'd had to reveal about my own past during this particular trip. "I met Edward when I first arrived in Forks, we started dating a month or so after that when he saved me from some muggers and I learned what he was, he helped to save me from another vampire who wanted to kill me, and..."

For a moment, I stood in silence- actually saying what I was about to say would somehow make it more real; I couldn't even remember whether I'd told Charlie about the Cullens leaving and Edward breaking up with me or if someone else had done it-, but in the end I finished my sentence. "And then, on my eighteenth birthday, his brother slipped up and tried to attack me after I suffered a papercut while unwrapping my presents, and he just... decided that it wasn't worth sticking around any more."

"Ah," the Doctor said, looking at me in a blank manner that could have meant any kind of reaction to the news he'd just heard, before he looked more pointedly at me. "When you said that you wanted to be with him forever... you meant that literally, didn't you?"

"Well... yes," I said, looking awkwardly at the Doctor, a slightly hostile tint to his expression that I'd never seen before as he stared at me, as though he'd suddenly evaluated his opinion of me and didn't like the result. "You... you don't like vampires, do you?"

"I could tolerate them if they were just trying to live; it's the way they want to kill or convert everyone else when I come across them that I object to," the Doctor clarified, sighing as he walked over to lean against a counter as he looked at me. "Vampirism has a tendency to warp even the best of minds; I once knew a vampire who tried to abstain from human blood by creating human clones as blank slates to feed on-"

"Hold on; _clones_ as a food source?" I said, my uncertainty about how the Doctor would react to my confession forgotten in the face of this confusing news. "Why not just feed on animals? That's what the Cullens did..."

"Most of the vampires I've encountered have noted that animal blood is virtually tasteless in comparison to human blood; they probably _could_ live on animal blood, but the taste contrast just means that most of them don't think it's worth the effort," the Doctor explained, although I did notice a slightly hopeful smile crossing his lips before he continued speaking. "Anyway, the point is that the vampire who set those experiments up had good intentions, but she was just trying the wrong way of dealing with them; she was too focused on the idea that a vampire has to prey on humans to consider, for example, the possibility of identifying what made human blood different from animal blood and working out a way to artificially synthesise the element that made the difference..."

He sighed as he looked over at the wall in front of him, lost in his memories even as he continued to speak. "And she wasn't even the worst of it; I once encountered a scientist who turned himself into a vampire as part of some scientific experiment he was carrying out- he was trying to synthesise the strengths of vampirism to create super-soldiers back in the First World War; the results were about what you'd expect-, and even if he was actually trying to contain the virus and avoid infecting others, his methods of tackling the problem were questionable at best; at one point he actually created multiple short-lived clones of me just so that he could guarantee access to my knowledge without the inconvenience of capturing me, letting the clones die of cellular degeneration and just making a new one with the memories of its predecessor each time the last one collapsed."

"Oh," I said, uncertain if there was anything else I could say in response to such disturbing information.

I'd always known that the Cullens were the exception to the general rule of what vampires would do, but I'd always just thought of other vampires as straightforward killers.

The idea of them deliberately creating life to feed on it...

"However," the Doctor said, looking at me with a slightly reassuring smile on his face, "I think I can trust that you wouldn't have dated Edward if he was killing people, right?"

"Of course not," I replied automatically; I might have been scared that Edward was capable of drinking from me, but I'd never assumed that he _would_ drink from me.

"And he didn't choose to become a vampire because he... wanted the power or anything like that?" the Doctor continued.

"From what Edward told me, he didn't even ask to be turned; he was dying of the Spanish influenza and his mother's dying wish was that Carlisle- Esme's husband, although he wouldn't actually meet and turn Esme until after Edward- save Edward any way he could," I explained (I thought about and rejected the idea of discussing Edward's self-loathing issues regarding his vampiric nature; even if we'd broken up, there were some things that should just always remain private even if you didn't like the person you were talking about any more).

"Then you're ahead of me," the Doctor said, a smile on his face that I could only describe as reflectively morbid. "An old... well, I suppose you could call her a 'girlfriend', although it wasn't like that in any sense of the word that you'd recognise- actually _let_ herself become a vampire because she thought that the founder of our society had deliberately become one as he recognised that they were the future and was just waiting around in his tomb for the moment when the undead ruled the cosmos."

"Oh," I said again, still stuck for anything more interesting that I could say in response to something like that (Somehow, the idea of the Doctor dating just seemed strange; I could accept the idea that he'd had other friends, even without the stories he'd told me in the past, but the concept of him doing anything _that_ conventional seemed strange). "What happened to her?"

"I threw her out of the TARDIS while it was in flight," the Doctor replied grimly.

I wasn't sure what to say in response to that, so I decided not to say anything, simply sitting in silence as the two of us stood around the kitchen, stuck for anything else that we could or should say in this situation.

"Still," the Doctor said at last, clapping his hands together as he looked over at me, "the important thing is, we've preserved the timeline and stopped the vampire lords acquiring a race of virtually indestructible vampire/Ogri hybrids; all in all, not a bad day's work, wouldn't you agree?"

"Definitely not," I agreed, nodding in agreement at the Time Lord.

I wasn't going to fool myself by thinking that the Doctor was completely over this particular issue- he hadn't asked me if I still wanted to become a vampire even after Edward left me, and I wasn't about to bring it up when I didn't know the answer to that question either-, but we were at a good place right now, and there was no reason for either of us to bring up those issues, so we wouldn't.

"So..." I asked, smiling hopefully at him, "what now?"

"Definitely not," I agreed, smiling at him in return. "So... what now?"

"Keep on travelling, really," the Doctor said, smiling back at me as he headed for the door. "After that particular mess, I think we could both do with a nice, random trip, wouldn't you agree?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those fans who want to know, the other vampire encounters the Doctor mentioned here took place in "Goth Opera", "Project: Twilight", "Project: Lazarus" and "Vampire Science"; feel free to look them up for more specific information if you want.
> 
> With this look at Bella's past concluded, coming up, the two find themselves taking a trip into the Doctor's past, as he finds himself facing some old enemies in the 1950s (They're from a novel, but that's all you're getting right now)...

**Author's Note:**

> Short, I know, but I hope you like which Cullen I chose to 'visit'; it just always seemed slightly off to me that trained doctors could assume that Esme was so badly injured that she was already dead, when she was still alive enough for Carlisle to find and turn her later, so I thought that this seemed like as good an opportunity as any to account for that particular anomaly (How will be explained in the next chapter)
> 
> If anyone has questions about Bella knowing this kind of detail about Esme's past when it wasn't revealed in the books themselves, I'm assuming that she may have learned some of the general details about the Cullens' humans lives- where they were born, where and when they were turned, etc.- 'off-screen', even if the more difficult details like Esme's dead child or the exact details of Rosalie's human death were unknown to her at this time


End file.
